Monday, December 26, 2011

11. Mogwai - Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will:
Mogwai returned this year
with undoubtedly the best album title of the year. As I noted in my review of
the album in Inflatable Ferret, this album is more of recent period
Mogwai, and in that sense, there are no surprises. What is surprising is the
unceasing creative well of the band members. Even as they use the Mogwai format
of heavy-to-light instrumentals, they continue to produce tracks with amazing
dynamics, melodies, and arrangements (...in contrast to Explosions in the Sky,
another instrumental band who seem to have hit a cul de sac.) The hipster
wisdom about Mogwai is that that they peaked with their very first album, Mogwai Young Team, but
I’m in the minority who believes that every album since then (1997!) has a classic or two. They have
such a vast discography now that it can be a little daunting to get into, but I actually
think this new one is not a bad place to start. You have the long languid
crush-your-bones tracks, the sweeping uplifting calls to arms, the deeply
melancholy musical nostalgia, and the utter sadness of failure-without-redemption music, all here. I had tickets to see them in April but they canceled and
rescheduled to September because of visa problems. Then they canceled again,
and the shows have yet to be scheduled. We shall see.

12. Thurston Moore - Demolished Thoughts: Again, I’ve already
reviewed this both on Inflatable Ferret and had a brief note here. Who’d have
thought Moore had it in him to make a warm, lush, almost romantic album?
Produced by Beck, this has some parallels to Sea Change. While not quite as
brilliant as Beck’s magnum opus, Demolished Thoughts has a little bit of that
same weariness. What’s different is that it also has a tone of joy in it. All those
acoustic guitars, violins, and wooden instruments play music that would be ideal
for a sunny Sunday afternoon at Washington Square Park. Of course, it may or
may not be pertinent that Thurston Moore recently parted ways with Kim Gordon,
and perhaps this album is the soundtrack to his new life? Who knows. My favorite track is "Space" which has some of the gorgeosity of Love and Rockets' classic "Haunted When the Minutes Drag"... or "Saudade." Either way, it may be the best Sonic Youth-related product be released in the past... um, at least five years?

13. Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica: OPN is the name of Daniel Lopatin, some dude who lives in Brooklyn (where else) who makes music on vintage synthesizers and pianos. It's music more on the ambient, drone-y side of things, not unlike Boards of Canada's beatless soundscapes. There's a lot of space in this kind of electronic music, and that space often makes the music more creepy than evocative. This is another one that benefits from repeated listens, and once you start to distinguish each track you start to realize the arc of each song, from beginning to end, that there is some method to all of this. It's a little bit like the Books, especially in the way samples (especially vocal samples) are repeatedly looped and broken and looped again, to create a rhythm -- check out "Sleep Dealer" for example. But where the Books create a strange world out of normal everyday sounds, OPN do the same (and up the strangeness factor) with a panoply of analog synthesizers. I imagine that Pink Floyd's abandoned Household Objects project might have sounded a little bit like this if it they had synthesizers and GarageBand in 1974.

14. Radiohead - The King Of Limbs: So this album came out earlier this year, and it was a brief but exciting moment. Hearing the album was, however, underwhelming. It sounded vaguely unformed, meandering, almost tuneless. But you know, it's really grown on me, and I've come to appreciate it much much more now. If you have not heard it even once, prepare not to be able to tell the difference between the first four tracks. The album really takes off on the final four songs, beginning with "Lotus Flower," the song where Thom Yorke does his spassy dance in that video that was floating around a while back. "Give Up the Ghost" is a beautiful acoustic song while the album closer "Separator" is classic Radiohead pop that wouldn't out of place on In Rainbows. The best thing about the album is that it really works as a single musical statement. Any of the songs taken out of the context of the album really don't do justice to the overall power of the whole thing. Some people complain that Radiohead are too far down the road of programmed music and have permanently left behind the feel of a live band, but remarkably, despite all the bleeps and bloops of computers on this record, it sounds warm. And to prove that, they have recently released a live show (King of Limbs - Live from the Basement) where the band reproduced the whole album live in the studio. There's also a somewhat inessential album collecting various remixes of the album entitled TKOL RMX 1234567, and while some of the folks recruited are impressive (Caribou, Four Tet, Modeselektor, etc.), it's not that great. What is great is that the band released a few songs from the same sessions later in the year, which are fantastic, particularly "Supercollider" and "The Butcher."

15. Real Estate - Days: I first heard Real Estate a couple of years ago when their song "Beach Comber" came out, which I played like a million times. I couldn't believe that there was a song this good that existed; very good R.E.M.-ish Byrds-esque indie rock circa mid-1980s. Maybe it was a bit nostalgic for me, but again, I'm a sucker for a good pop tune that's just a bit off-kilter. The new album is all that and more. Standout tracks are "Younger Than Yesterday" (a sly Byrds reference?) and the brilliant "It's Real." There seems to be a slight resurgence of 1980s-era indie guitar pop these days (see also the band Wild Nothing with their Smiths-esque Gemini from a year or two ago). Real Estate may be the best of the lot. I know I should be posting something from the new album but I can't help but post "Beach Comber" yet again (via Stereogum).

16. Seefeel - Seefeel: This, probably the best electronic band of the 1990s, suddenly reformed in 2010, released an e.p. (Faults) and then a full album in 2011. Bizarrely, as far as I could tell, no one noticed and the album kind of dropped out of sight. Just to back up, Seefeel produced some of the most beautiful electronic music of the nineties. And they somehow they did it all (mostly) with guitars. I like to think that if Kevin Shields hadn't lost his shit and produced a follow-up to Loveless, it might have sounded a bit like Seefeel's utterly brilliant Polyfusia (actually a compilation of singles and e.p.'s). I've written love letters to Seefeel on my blog before (and on the now long lost Fred newsletter), but I haven't mentioned this album yet. The most stark difference with earlier Seefeel here is that they have a live drummer, Lida Kazuhisa (or E-Da) who used to drum for the Boredoms. The main architects of the band, Mark Clifford and Sarah Peacock, still produced blissful music but it sounds more fractured, damaged, brittle, distorted, largely to the dry syncopated drumming that gives it an almost tribal tone. It's definitely an acquired taste and on the fringes of experimental pop but frequent listens will be rewarded. A worthy return from a great band. Here's a recent interview with Clifford and Peacock.

17. St. Vincent - Strange Mercy: I didn't pay that much attention to St. Vincent (Annie Clark) until I saw her shred some guitar covering Big Black's "Kerosene." I mean I'd heard a few tracks here and there (including "Actor Out of Work") but this new album really caught my attention. She seems to have a little bit of the nice-mannered-young-woman-bordering-on-deranged sensibility (a la Kristen Hersh) but without being too predictable. She's clearly very talented as an instrumentalist and the album makes good use of many different instruments (including trumpets, clarinets, violins, flutes) but you kind of never forget the guitar which is front and center here. Which is what you get from this clip:

It will be interesting to see where she goes from here.

18. Tinariwen - Tassili: I've liked Tinariwen for a while now (loved "Amassakoul 'N' Tenere") and judging by the press they've gotten in recent years, they have a big following here in the U.S.. This is partly I think enabled by the fact that members of TV on the Radio have played with them. Incredibly, they were on the Colbert Report recently. Their music is still a nice mix of Tuareg blues but now the band incorporates more rock influences (including songs in English). The album is also very live-sounding, very loose, like a band jamming along, almost discovering unexpected trajectories for each song to take. I wouldn't go quite as far as NPR when they called Tinariwen "just about the best guitar-based rock band of the 21st century" but they are exploring similar spaces that bands like Television did back in the 1970s, a kind of a dream-trance state of guitar music. This makes it three-in-a-row for great Tinariwen albums, and Tassili holds up well to repeat listens. Dream on.

19. Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring For My Halo: I’ve already written a bit
about Kurt Vile so I won’t repeat what I wrote before. It has a classic rock
vibe not unlike a young Tom Petty—his vocal affectations are eerily like Petty
at times—but there’s something about Vile’s music that raises it above generic
classic rock nostalgia. The low-fi production, the surprisingly warm and
creative arrangements, and most of all, the killer tunes, make this worth all
the praise it has gotten. It's the perfect modern classic rock album in ages. Almost
every song on the album has pop melodies that get right to the heart. And the
heart is really the target here; although not all the songs are about love,
they're all about romance, damaged romance for a variety of topics, one of
which happen to be girls. And I’m unable to explain exactly why but this may be
my favorite album of the year. I’ve listened to it a thousand times and I keep
coming back to it over and over again. Worthy of note: he’s released a follow-up
e.p. called So Outta Reach that has been packaged with newer editions of Smoke Ring
For My Halo.

1. Can - Tago Mago (originally 1971): I come to kraut rock as a complete novice.
I’ve resisted the temptation for years to listen to this stuff, especially
when, in the late 1990s, it became the hipster badge-of-coolness to have some
awareness of krautrock. And then by the early 2000s, when every band this side
of Interpol was talking about motorik, I actively resisted. I’m also wary of
the revisionist history that folks like Pitchfork will throw at you. People
really didn’t listen to this stuff in the 1970s. Or most people didn’t. So
their influence was minimal at best, until, I would say, post-punk a la P.I.L. and
stuff like that. So my sum total of krautrock songs I’d heard until 2011 was
1. And that was the song “Oh Yeah” from this very album, a track I heard only because it was
on an awesome compilation I’d picked up back when I lived in Northampton in the
‘90s. Either way, “Oh Yeah” was actually quite amazing, and for the longest
time I actually thought that the percussion on the song was programmed, not
realizing that, no, it was actually a LIVE human being playing drums. So
anyway, on a whim I picked up this reissue thinking that I should start my
krautrock education at basically Year Zero, or Tago Mago. Because I’ve read so
much about Tago Mago, it’s hard to escape the weight of its legacy. Yet, I
found it oddly freeing to have never heard it until now. I don’t owe it anything. I
wasn’t gonna like it if it sucked. That was basically what I came with. So... now that I’ve
heard it a few times I can say that it is indeed good. It has the
slight whiff of post-Barrett Pink Floyd, vaguely from the Ummagumma years. The two most "visible"
instruments are the drums and the vocals, the formerly cranking into a
mesmerizing metronome beat that’s mechanical and hypnotic, and
sometimes creepy. Damo Suzuki’s vocals mostly play as instruments rather than vocals;
and if sometimes he sounds absolutely insane (see “Mushroom”) he also knows
when to modulate and drone (see “Oh Yeah”). And one more thing I didn’t know
about Can: they sure know how to funk up the music: “Halleluhwah” absolutely
cranks up the ‘70s funk even as it creates some sort of space rock jam
in a foreign language that wouldn’t be out of place at the Saturday night party
on an interstellar battleship heading off to a new nebula. In the context
what’s going in 1971, sure, it’s out of place, but not that out of place, if
you consider the whacky stuff even popular bands like Pink Floyd were doing.
But you know, as a piece of music ripped out of its context, it is an oddly
perfect album to bridge the personal with the social. I’ve listened to it on
headphones in airplanes and airports, and it seems to mirror the anxieties and
movement of the mass of people around me perfectly, while at the same time
creating a bubble around me. About the reissue: it comes with a second disc containing a complete live Can concert (three songs!) from 1972. Two
of the three “songs” on the live CD are also featured on the original album but they bear absolutely no
resemblance to the recorded versions. Highly recommended!

2. Nirvana - Nevermind (originally 1991): What to
say about Nevermind at this point? I have a (very) long essay actually
coming up soon on that very issue, but as far as the reissue is
concerned, is there much to say? Well, the album is the album, everybody knows the deal, but what about the extras? Disc 1 has
appended (after the original album) all the original single b-sides some of
which are actually essential (“Aneurysm,” for example). Disc 2 has a bunch of
previously unreleased tracks from around the time of Nevermind, most of which
are alternate versions of songs you’ve already heard a million times. Sure,
some of them are of moderate interest (especially some of the pre-Butch Vig
versions of the songs, which are generally inferior). There’s the absolutely
incredible cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Here She Comes Now” which has
actually been floating around on several compilations. The key tracks, that I
think worth getting (or at least hearing) are: a brilliant version of “Sappy,” and
low quality boom box-recorded versions of “Verse Chorus Verse” and “Old Age.”
All three songs are, in my mind, as good as any of the songs actually on
Nevermind. “Old Age” in particular was “taken” by Courtney Love and released as
a b-side by her band Hole without any writing credit to Kurt Cobain. I’m not
an audiophile so I’m not terribly interested in Disc 3, basically a slightly
different mix of Nevermind. Disc 4 is worth getting: a complete live
show from Halloween 1991 in Seattle. This one has been bootlegged a million
times and this pristine recording shows why: it is the three-piece band at
absolutely the top of their game. They rip through various Nevermind and Bleach
tunes with a single-minded focus that is impressive. Opening the set is a brilliang electric cover of the Vaselines’ “Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam,”
which later showed up as an acoustic song on “MTV Unplugged.” Just to round out things, there is also a DVD of that Halloween show, with the film remastered to such clarity that the sweat flying off the band members can be seen in Hi-Def.
All-in-all, this box set is not worth getting unless you're into the live show and the
DVD. And unless you fetishize expensive and redundant objects that remind you of your lost adolescence. You decide.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

So, I've been perusing through various year-end lists and the one thing that I've realized is how little new music I heard in 2011. I went to NPR, I went to Sound Opinions, Stereogum, the Quietus, PopMatters, Pitchfork, and I have no idea about most of these artists/bands. Never heard of most of them. What does that mean?

Well, it means many things, but first and foremost, it means that I'm disconnected from the prevailing critical consensus. For some reason, by the end of the year, you start to see the same old records circulating in everybody's lists, and you're never sure why. Is it because everybody actually likes those albums? Or is because they don't wanna feel left out?

Second, it means that I'm disconnected from what is required listening for people who are "up-to-date." This means that my music tastes are slowly calcifying, held back a little bit more firmly every year by the accumulating inertia of a collected past. The past is a big presence in my imagination these days. In fact, the past was one of the big stories of popular culture these days, judging by the fact that one of the most thought-provoking books out this year was Simon Reynolds' Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past. Just today I stumbled upon a piece in Vanity Fair about the same topic. I'll have more to say about the past in a later post, but looking at my list of my favorite albums of the year, one gets the obvious creeping realization that there's nothing really new or innovative that I'm listening to. Everything on the list could have been made in 1992, honestly. This is something that's been preying on me more and more the last few years, that all the music I've been listening to, since about 2000, kind of sounds like a facsimile--perhaps a more high-tech facsimile--of music that was around before. But then, saying that, kind of sounds like an old grandpa thing to say. "Back in my day, mumble, mumble, etc."

Either way, here is my list of 20 albums that I liked in 2011. They're mostly old bands and what not, but they did reflect music that I repeatedly heard all through the year. I tend to listen to a lot of music. A lot of music. On my headphones, walking around, at home, going to sleep, etc. At home, I rarely watch TV or anything visual--if I have the choice of watching TV or listening to music, I'll almost always opt for the latter. The main problem has been that since about 2005, my music collection has grown in leaps and bounds thanks to the internet, so I'm basically accumulating more music than I can actually listen to. My iPod currently has something like 15,262 songs. It we assume that each song is about 4 minutes long on average, that comes to about 42 days of non-stop music. So basically, there's a lot of competition for my music-listening time. So... in the battle between a new album and something old, the new one has to be really good for me to occupy my time. So what fell into that category in 2011? In alphabetical order, they are:

Some more detailed thoughts on the first ten on this list. In a few days, I'll have capsule reviews of the remaining ten.

1. Atlas Sound - Parallax: I've developed a fascination and respect for Bradford Cox, he of the band Deerhunter, who is obviously as obsessed with creating music as I am but has about 100 times more talent and motivation to do it. He has a wonderful imagination, not unlike Kristen Hersh, in that you imagine that his songs come out as fully formed reflections of ideas that pop into his head. And sure, some of it is self-consciously referential to the history of pop music but Cox really makes it sound so attractive and alluring, it's hard to resist. This, I think is the best of his solo albums (which he releases under the name Atlas Sound). If there's a common stylistic thread to it, it's a vague nod to early 1970s pop, embellished with modern electronics and guitars. Listen to this song, "Terra Incognito":

2. Battles - Gloss Drop: Much has been made of the fact Battles lost a key member last year, and now they are down to a three-piece band. They're about as "experimental" as any band gets in my list, but they still work within the confines of pop. This album is very much a different beast than the previous one, in that it really exudes ebbulience. There's a joy here that's kind of refreshing. The record is like a soundtrack to a party written and orchestrated by a bunch of very skilled but excited geeks. You can see that joy in this awesome live performance of the song "Futura" from this album.

3. Bombino - Agadez: I don't know much about him but he's apparently from Niger (or Agadez, to be precise). The dude, whose "real" name is Omara Moctar, is a sublime guitarist, and produces something called Tuareg blues. Bombino has lived through a lot of strife and conflict, particularly a civil war within Niger involving the Tuareg minority rebelling against the central Niger government. Not sure if any of this informs his guitar-playing but it's hypnotic and mesmerizing, almost trance-inducing. A little bit like Tinariwen (see below) but more drone-ish, if that's possible.

4. AA Bondy - Believers: Back in the nineties, I used to like this band called Verbena, kind of a sub-Nirvana power trio playing punkish rock'n'roll. I liked them a lot, even saw them live once in Pittsburgh in a tiny little club where the band seemed surly and uncomfortable. Fast forward a decade, the main guy from Verbena has gone solo, completely disavowed his punk rock past, and now plays Dylanesque folkish Americana. I'm not a big fan of the genre as practiced by contemporary musicians (if I want my Dylan fix, I listen to Dylan) but Bondy is a rare gem. His songs really do sound like ghosts singing them. I had a previous post on Bondy but his new album is even more spectral and eerie than usual. It's goes along at the speed of Low backed by Galaxie 500 with the spirit of Dylan hovering by. Beautiful. Listen and reflect:

5. Kate Bush - 50 Words For Snow: Kate, O Kate, wherefore art thou, O Kate? Kate is so strange. Kate is 53 years old now but we still remember her as a 20 year old when "Wuthering Heights" came out back in 1978. I don't want to rehash her career since then--others can do (and have done) that much better than I. I listened to The Whole Story all through my college years, without doubt one of the best "greatest hits" compilations ever put together. She disappeared for a while but came back with Aerial in 2005, and now in 2011, she put out two albums, one called Director's Cut, which revisits some of her latter day material, and this one, 50 Words For Snow, a brand new album that is as weird and yet old old-fashioned as one might expect from Kate Bush. When I say "old fashioned" I don't mean regressive, just that Kate Bush has a very "old world" mentality. Many of her songs are about nature, especially the misty dark wintery wisps of English nature, and this one is no different. There are songs here about the life of a snowflake, a love song to a snowman, about a lake in search of a dog, and one that summarizes 50 (somewhat absurd) words for snow. Steve Gadd (who played drums on "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" and "Aja") provides subtle but wonderful percussion throughout on this largely piano-based album that has been a perfect winter companion for me.

6. Death In Vegas - Trans-Love Energies: Most people probably know Death In Vegas from the lovely "Girls" from the Lost In Translation soundtrack, and that's not a bad thing. But Death In Vegas have a much wider palette than evocative electronica; their album Dead Elvis (1997) still remains one of my favorite albums of the nineties and a fantastic journey through all manner of electronic music from four-on-the-floor techno, to hip hop, to guitar-based My Bloody Valentine-esque dance anthems. They kind of disappeared for a few years but have come back with this album (and the subsequent e.p., Medication). Trans-Love Energies has a lot of my favorite influences (kraut rock, electronic dance music, My Bloody Valentine) but it puts it all together in a pretty amazing seamless whole. If you want moody dance music that isn't always for dancing but for blissing out, this is perfect. Lead architect Richard Fearless explains his aesthetic here. There's no one song that really does justice to the album, as all the tracks are so different, but the 7+ minutes of "Your Loft" captures a little of the blissosity of the album.

7. The Field - Looping State of Mind: I have a soft spot for this guy (Alex Willner), especially his album, From Here We Go Sublime, which is the kind of techno, ambient, repetitive techno, I love. Willner, as the Field, basically takes a perfect instrumental loop and slowly adds keyboards, guitars, and all manner of noise until by the end of the song, you reach a wall of sound designed to overpower you into the great sublime. What makes this album particularly different from his prior efforts is that he appropriates a variety of other musical genres into his music, including gospel, shoegaze, house, funk, and guitar-based rock. You'd think that mixing all this stuff into one would be have the Wal-Mart effect, i.e., lots of different things no unified purpose, but amazingly this album works. It has a suitably happy (or at least upbeat) and almost transcendental vibe. I imagine that if this was around in 1967, the hippie kids would be listening to this as they swayed back-and-forth at their love-ins.

8. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake: I wrote a long review of this album for Inflatable Ferret, so I won't repeat all of what I said there. One thing I did write: "There is death everywhere on the album but the music is light, sometimes even jaunty, often pretty (as in 'Hanging in the Wire'). Where her last two albums were musically spartan, sometimes sounding incomplete or brittle, the music here is lush, full of reverb... She expands her musical palette with plinks of electric piano, xylophones, trumpets, saxophones, and strange samples... The pop centerpiece of the album is 'The Words That Maketh Murder,' an almost creepy song constructed out of a skip-dancing beat wrapped around a simple descending figure on an autoharp and a saxophone. She sings, 'I've seen and done things I want to forget / I've seen soldiers fall like lumps of meat / Blown and shot out beyond belief / Arms and legs were in the trees.' "

9. M83 - Hurry Up, We're Dreaming: Wow, well, what to say about this? Who makes double albums these days? Anthony Gonzalez says that he was trying to emulate the Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (or The White Album). To try and create something big, huge, expansive, ambitious, sprawling, etc. His music has always been about nostalgia, but in this case, it's nostalgia for a kind of musical experience that wasn't simply about music, but about the act of buying and hearing records with sleeves, lyrics, pictures, etc., and how it used to be before everything migrated on-line. Musically, everything you need to know about the album you can figure out by watching "Midnight City" (below) which is being transmitted directly from the year 1985, sounding a lot like a track from Songs From the Big Chair (or maybe The Hurting).... but what's the harm in that? Especially if the melodies are great and the production makes you want to yearn for things that you didn't even know existed as you slide ever so further away from adolescence. In a way, this album is much more like Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts (but with a much more eighties vibe) and less like (still my favorite) Saturdays=Youth which was a concise and perfect pop statement that wasn't as much looking in the rearview mirror as this one is. Still, the more I listen to Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, the more I love it for its music rather than its ambition. Great for a really long drive.

10. Metronomy - The English Riviera: Look, I don't really know much about who these people are, but they must be from the UK since they were up for the Mercury Prize (ultimately won by PJ Harvey). It's great pop music, light, breezy, catchy. A bit like Phoenix but more clever, I think, but just as eager to stay "pop" and not "rock." Surely, these guys would have intersected with Steely Dan if they'd been around in the seventies, perhaps with some plastic soul thrown in? I'm actually shocked that anyone makes this good pop music in 2011. Everyone else is either too serious or too retarded or too clever or too hip. Not these guys; Metronomy seem utterly incapable of writing a poorly conceived pop song and they make it seem effortless. Can this really be the best unabashed candy pop album of the year? You be the judge on my favorite song off the album, "The Look." (And I forgot to mention, they have the coolest looking bassist of all time).

The rest of my list in a couple of days + my favorite reissues/compilations and soundtracks. (and below, another clip from Battles doing "Futura" at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago this past summer.